A Quick Guide to AMA Referencing | Cite Your Sources Correctly

Referencing means acknowledging the sources you have used in your writing. Including references helps you support your claims and ensures that you avoid plagiarism

There are many referencing styles, but they usually consist of two things:

• A citation wherever you refer to a source in your text.
• A reference list or bibliography at the end listing full details of all your sources.

The most common method of referencing in UK universities is AMA style, which uses author-date citations in the text. Our free AMA Reference Generator automatically creates accurate references in this style.

AMA reference examples

In-text citation	Sources should always be cited properly (Pears and Shields, 2019)
Reference list	Pears, R. and Shields, G. (2019) Cite them right: The essentials referencing guide. 11th edn. London: MacMillan.

Referencing Style

Each referencing style has different rules for presenting source information. For in-text citations, some use footnotes or endnotes, while others include the author's surname and date of publication in brackets in the text.

The reference list or bibliography is presented differently in each style, with different rules for things like capitalisation, italics, and quotation marks in references.

Your university will usually tell you which referencing style to use; they may even have their own unique style. Always follow your university's guidelines, and ask your tutor if you are unsure. The most common styles are summarised below.

Citing your sources with in-text citations

Each referencing style has different rules for presenting source information. For in-text citations, some use footnotes or endnotes, while others include the author's surname and date of publication in brackets in the text.

The reference list or bibliography is presented differently in each style, with different rules for things like capitalisation, italics, and quotation marks in references.

Your university will usually tell you which referencing style to use; they may even have their own unique style. Always follow your university's guidelines, and ask your tutor if you are unsure. The most common styles are summarised below.

In-text citation

In-text citations are quick references to your sources. In AMA referencing, you use the author's surname and the date of publication in brackets.

Up to three authors are included in a AMA in-text citation. If the source has more than three authors, include the first author followed by ‘et al.‘

Numbers of authors	Harvard in-text citation example
1 author	(Jones, 2017)
2 author	(Jones and Singh, 2017)
3 author	(Jones, Singh and Smith, 2017)
4 author	(Jones et al., 2017)

The point of these citations is to direct your reader to the alphabetised reference list, where you give full information about each source. For example, to find the source cited above, the reader would look under ‘J' in your reference list to find the title and publication details of the source.

Placement of in-text citations

In-text citations should be placed directly after the quotation or information they refer to, usually before a comma or full stop. If a sentence is supported by multiple sources, you can combine them in one set of brackets, separated by a semicolon.

If you mention the author's name in the text already, you don't include it in the citation, and you can place the citation immediately after the name.

Citing your sources with in-text citations

The terms ‘bibliography' and ‘reference list' are sometimes used interchangeably. Both refer to a list that contains full information on all the sources cited in your text. Sometimes ‘bibliography' is used to mean a more extensive list, also containing sources that you consulted but did not cite in the text.

A reference list or bibliography is usually mandatory, since in-text citations typically don't provide full source information. For styles that already include full source information in footnotes (e.g. OSCOLA and Chicago Style), the bibliography is optional, although your university may still require you to include one.

Go through our Other Guides as well

Chicago Style guide MLA Style guide APA Style guide Oxford Style guide AMA Style guide Vancouver Style guide